As I announced in the fall, I’m glad to be joining forces with my Pentecostal colleague Van Johnson to host a Wesleyan-Pentecostal symposium on experience and theology this coming Tuesday. When we sat down more than a year ago and began to discuss this possibility, Donald Dayton was at the top of our list of potential presenters, and we were delighted that he said yes.  Dayton’s work in teasing out the theological connections between the Wesleyan-Holiness and Pentecostal traditions has been groundbreaking, and has blazed a trail for a whole body of Pentecostal scholarship.  He is also one of the most respected voices in Wesleyan scholarship, having received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Wesleyan Theological Society in 2010.

There is still time to sign up for the symposium, but if you can’t make it, we will be livestreaming Datyon’s lecture at 10:15 am EDT this Tuesday.

The full schedule is posted on the event page, and I’ve also listed the papers below.  As usual, we’ve got a nice mix of scholars, graduate students, and scholar-practitioners.

My own paper will focus on the role of experience in the theology of three figures in Canadian Wesleyan history: Nelson Burns, founder of the Canada Holiness Association, Ralph Horner, founder of the Holiness Movement Church and the Standard Church of America, and Nathanael Burwash, Chancellor of Victoria College at the University of Toronto and a leading mainline Methodist theologian.

I’m looking forward to a great day of discussion.  I hope you can consider participating, either in person or via livestream. The video of the lecture will also be posted as a recording after the event, along with audio of other presentations.

Papers to be presented at the Wesleyan-Pentecostal Symposium, March 22:

• Bradley Truman Noel, “Experiential Verification: The Pentecostal Advantage in Hermeneutics?”
• John Vlainic, “How a Theology of Experience Shows Up in Pastoral Care.”
• James E. Read, “‘Whatever it is which reason or experience shows’: Experience in a Wesleyan approach to ethics”
• Stephen J. Bedard, “Experience as Christian Apologetics.”
• Justin Schwartz, “Objectivity is the Fruit of Subjectivity: Experience as a Fundamental Category for Theology in the work of Bernard Lonergan”
• Janelle Zeeb, “Comparing Arminianism and Open Theism on Theodicy: An Example of How Experience Affects our Preferences for Theological Systems”
• Peter D. Neumann, “Pentecostal Mediated Immediacy: Overcoming Experience of God as Ecumenical Barrier”
• James E. Pedlar, “Experience and Theology: Lessons from some Canadian Examples.”